Web Development

Twitter's Bootstrap 3 Polished and Shined

Two years into its project life, the Bootstrap front-end web development framework has reached version 3 with a new look and feel, plus a number of interesting components.

Bootstrap started as an internal project at Twitter but became an open source project and now has over 300 contributors.

Designed for web developers to build both desktop and mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Bootstrap 3 features user interface components including (the more standard types such as) buttons, input fields, labels, lists — but also (the more unconventional inclusion of ) glyphicons, badges, and jumbotron.

According to the development team, "Nearly everything has been redesigned and rebuilt to start from your handheld devices and scale up." With regard to the new customizer — it has been redesigned. "It is now compiled in the browser instead of Heroku, has better dependency support, and even has built-in error handling. Better yet, we now save your customizations to an anonymous Gist for easy reuse, sharing, and modifications."

This web development framework (now at version 3.0 as stated above) has in fact moved from the desktop to support mobile development as well since the 2.0 iteration — but now, with version 3.0, the mobile device is targeted specifically, while at the same time embodying enough flexibility to also run on applications on larger screen sizes.

NOTE: Internet Explorer 7 support has been removed from version 3 of Bootstrap.

According to the development team blog, "With Bootstrap 3, we've gone deep on responsive and mobile first — it's built in and no longer requires a separate stylesheet. That's great for most folks, but not everyone needs or wants an adaptive web site or application. To help, we've added some documentation and an example that disables the adaptive or responsive features with some extra CSS."

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This month's Dr. Dobb's Journal

This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!